When one attempts to conjure up the hallmarks of an all-American
summer, certain things will
invariably come to mind. Sweltering
heat, chocolate covered bacon and
deep fried Oreos at the county fair,
and autonomous robotics competitions. At least for us, trips to the
San Diego County Fair have always
involved robots in some capacity,
whether it was combat robots or
FIRST robots. This year, we were once
again brought back to the Del Mar
Fairgrounds by the incomparable allure
of a robotics competition, though this

time we were only spectators. Yes,
2009 witnessed the second annual
iARoC event — the International
Autonomous Robotics Competition.

The Tall and the
Short of It

iARoC was held in the Kid’s Best
area of the San Diego County Fair,
and as such it was surrounded by
carnival games and a whole host of
curiously fried foods. When we first
entered the large white tent housing
the competition on the fairgrounds,

FIGURE 2. THE TWO ENTRIES FROM TEAM SPOT-ON. THEIR MAZE RUNNER IS
ON THE LEFT AND THE GOLD RUSHER IS ON THE RIGHT.

two things immediately caught our
attention. The first was the myriad
of children’s drawings festooning
every wall of the tent — we were in
the Kid’s Best area of the Fair,
after all. The second was that the
competition seemed to be full of
iRobot Roombas. We didn’t know
how effective the little guys would be
for a maze challenge, but we thought
that they would at least keep the
arena clean.

As it turns out, what we thought
were Roombas were actually iRobot

Creates, an educational robotics platform
that can be simply described as
a Roomba without a vacuum
(one competitor, however, was a
real deal Roomba, vacuum and
all). We would become very well
acquainted with the iRobot
Create after visiting all of the
teams, but first we were greeted
by competition founder Vic
Wintriss. He was very busy
making sure everything was
running smoothly (which it was),
so we only received a quick
introduction to the competition
challenges. We could catch up
on the history of iARoC after we
caught up with the teams.